Two years have flown by, and in that time English outfit The Pineapple Thief are back on the road with a new studio record. In recent years the band has drawn a ton of attention from prog rock fans, ever since former Porcupine Tree drummer Gavin Harrison joined the ranks. Their popularity has visibly grown, but they still haven’t made it to Slovenia. The closest they’ve come, with Lizzard in support, was a stop in Vienna.
Vienna’s Szene isn’t a huge club, so with an average turnout the room already feels pretty full. With Lizzard opening, it at first looked like there wouldn’t be much interest, even though their listener base could easily be pretty similar to the headliners’. The French trio, who describe themselves as art rock, served up songs from their current album »Shift«, released this year. The trio, who already proved themselves in Slovenia, didn’t disappoint this time either. Every song had its own thing going on. You could hear influences from progressive rock, stoner rock, post rock, psychedelic rock and a few other things besides. There’s nothing to fault in how tight the band is. The whole thing breathed, and each member of the trio more than did their part. The guitarist strung together a bunch of interesting riffs, occasionally using a looper, so a guitar backing would repeat through a song, the bassist filled out the sound with his bass lines, and the drummer was right there too, surprising with her rhythms and little touches on the cymbals. Lizzard are without a doubt a band with promise, if they keep being this inventive and keep working on new material.
With The Pineapple Thief, it was only logical that the new album Dissolution, which came out at the end of August, would take center stage. So the band opened with Try As I Might, and also played a few songs from Your Wilderness and Magnolia. In a very short set, the quintet showed they take their craft seriously. The songs were played with precision, the show was polished, and the lighting was great too, bringing out the band’s atmosphere beautifully. The Pineapple Thief could sound dreamy, complex and gentle. On the softer songs, the vocalist picked up an acoustic guitar, which gave the performance extra layers and also showed the indie rock influence in the songs. But the tracks that stood out most were the more progressive ones with greater rhythmic variety. Sure, Bruce Soord is the one up front, but quite a few times the spotlight deservedly went to drummer Gavin Harrison. The guy who made his name in King Crimson and Porcupine Tree kept wowing the crowd with his playing the whole time. Every hit made sense, and there was no overdoing the fills like so many other academy-trained players. Harrison obviously knows he doesn’t need to solo all the time to get noticed. Despite certain members standing out, The Pineapple Thief worked as a whole. Their repertoire showed real variety. The punchier songs were up front, with the distorted 3000 Days and Nothing at Best, the song that first got the band bigger attention, standing out.
After a good hour the band left the Szene stage, but following a thunderous round of applause from the crowd they came back for three more songs. With Not Naming Any Names they gently eased into The Final Thing on My Mind from Your Wilderness, one of the band’s more progressive songs. And with the closer Snowdrops, they even dug into material more than ten years old.
A packed Szene made it clear that after years of hard graft, The Pineapple Thief have become one of the more promising bands in progressive rock today. The same goes, of course, for French oddballs Lizzard.
author: Primož Novak
photos: Aleš Podbrežnik
LIZZARD:
1. Singularity
2. Vigilent
3. The Orbiter
4. Loose Ends
5. Shift
6. Mined
7. Passing By
THE PINEAPPLE THIEF:
1. Try as I Might
2. In Exile
3. Alone at Sea
4. Threatening War
5. Far Below
6. No Man’s Land
7. That Shore
8. All That You’ve Got
9. Shed a Light
10. 3000 Days
11. Part Zero
12. White Mist
13. Nothing at Best
—encore—
14. Not Naming Any Names
15. The Final Thing on My Mind
16. Snowdrops
